I have lost count on the amount of times we have received hard drives for data recovery from Mac customers, who are not aware of the Time Machine back software. Time Machine has been preinstalled in every version of OS X since 10.5. This software is easy to setup, and once the first backup of the internal hard drive is complete, it will then carry on backing up as you create new data.
As a small business or personal user it is ideal for your everyday backup needs.
This hard drive was out of a customers Macbook Pro. As you can see in the image, loss of data caused by a severe head crash. Another good reason why Mac users should make sure they back up regularly.
ST9320421ASG Head Crash
HP Smart Array E200i SaS Drive
We have just competed a successful recovery from an HP Smart Array E200i RAID array. Not a standard case this. It had x3 DG146BB976 2.5″ SaS drives, two of which had been overwritten with a new RAID 1 mirror.
We found the disk order which was not the same as the labelled numbers. This is often the case. Also, due to the rebuild that had occurred we had to drop one of the disks and virtually rebuild it using the parity information from the other disks.
3 DG146BB976 / ST9146802SS SaS Drives
If you want to find out which version of Mac OS X is installed on a drive, but cannot boot into it, there is a plist file that holds the version number.
The file can be found at:
Macintosh HD > System > Library > CoreServices > SystemVersion.plist
Mac OS X System Version
The SystemVersion.plist file should look a bit like the picture below. I have outlined the relevant part in red:
System Version Plist
Alternatively you could paste the following command into terminal:
defaults read defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist | grep "ProductVersion"
This will show you the version of the currently booted system. You would need to change the first bit if you wanted to find out from another mounted drive.
The output will be:
ProductVersion = "10.7.2";
In my limited testing, this seems to have an error when run from 10.5. It says the file doesn’t exist. I will look into this some more.
We get asked this question a lot. The simple answer is that there is no such thing as a reliable hard drive. This is nothing against the hard drive manufacturers, but all drives will fail eventually. Hard drives are delicate machines and must be treated with care. They are not designed to be the one and only storage for all your work, photos and videos. Imagine your computer never booting up again, and then imagine it happening during the most important job you have ever done. That’s how bad it could be, and often is for a lot of people.
A good lifespan for a hard drive is now probably around 3-5 years. In reality we often see hard drives that are only a few months old. If you’re a gambler then maybe you have got away with it so far, but is it really worth the risk?
Backup your data. Maybe then you won’t need to find out how good we are at recovering it.
Read more about backing up your data here
We needed a dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 setup today, which had a few stumbling blocks.
Installed Windows 7 on half a 500GB drive and left 250GB free for Ubuntu. When booting to install Linux, it didn’t see Windows 7 due to the GPT partition that Windows 7 uses by default.
Used Gparted from the Linux live cd to format the drive with an MBR partition layout. (Note:- This destroyed the original Windows installation.) Then installed Windows back to the drive. This time, Ubuntu saw Windows 7 during installation and was happy to install alongside it.
Although the machine was now happily dual booting, it would default to Ubuntu, regardless of which changes i made to the grub config. Startup manager would make changes to grub, but it would still default to Ubuntu.
Nariub on the Ubuntu forums suggested changing the os-prober number, so it loads that first. This puts Windows at the top, making it the default. Perfect for what we needed.
The command for this, which worked for us on Ubuntu 11.10 & Windows 7:
mv /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober /etc/grub.d/09_os-prober
update-grub
So now we have the machine booting as we want, with each operating system happily taking up half of the 500GB drive.
My brother has just brought me his laptop to look at after forgetting the login password. It was frequently asking him to change the password, and one day he changed it and then forgot it. I found a simple command to stop the password from expiring:
First run Cmd (Command Line) as Administrator (click Start -> and type cmd. Right click on Cmd and choose “Run As Administrator”). If you followed correctly this should give you a black command line window with white text.
Then type:
net accounts /maxpwage:unlimited
And press return or enter.
It should congratulate you, or say successful (can’t remember the exact wording).
The password should then last forever, or until it is changed manually.
Note: It is good practice to change passwords regularly, however outside of corporate IT land can be a huge hassle. Just ask my brother 
This Seagate ST31000333AS 1TB drive suffered a head crash resulting in severe media damage. The contamination caused by the damage can be seen on the disc surface as well as the internal filter. The filter is usually white but is now silver metallic in colour as a result of the contamination. The customer did not have any indication that this was going to happen.
Seagate Head Crash ST31000333AS
Seagate ST31000333AS Filter
Just fixed an annoying problem that started when I upgraded to Lion. When dragging something to the dock from finder, or from a stack to Finder there would be a flash of strange coloured graphics at random points around the screen. It’s gone too fast for me to do a screenshot but I may try to get a small video of it.
Anyway, the fix is easy and involves turning the dock from 3D to 2D mode.
The Terminal commands are as follows:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
The first command sets the Dock into 2D mode, the second command resets the Dock to allow the changes to be seen.
Below is the About This Mac screen. It’s an old (Powerbook G4 Style) MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo.
Now I just need to find out why it takes so long to boot up.
Sometimes when we clone a Mac drive using unconventional methods, it works fine, but has an annoying side effect; Files that are usually hidden in the Finder are instead displayed and accessible to users. These files are hidden for a reason, and contain things like the UNIX system files and some Mac system files which you probably shouldn’t mess with.
Luckily there is a simple terminal command to make these files hidden again. It doesn’t delete them, just changes their file attributes.
sudo chflags hidden filename
sudo allows you to run commands as Super User so be careful! It will ask for a password (but not display it as you type…)
Where it says filename you can either replace it with a file or folder name, or drag a load of folders onto the terminal window and it will fill out the names for you.
An example below:
sudo chflags hidden /var
That would hide the var folder on the root of the boot drive.
I found this really helpful but as usual use it at your own risk…